Computer Systems Posts - Page 19

Today Gateway announced two new versions of its NE series laptops as well as updates to its DX, SX, and ZX desktop PCs. The company released new 15.6-inch and 17.3-inch versions of the NE series that are slimmer than the previous models and now feature AMD A4 and A6 processors. Additionally, the company now offers both laptops with up to 1 TB of storage.

The companies desktops did not change much aesthetically but as far as internals go there have been some pretty significant updates. The SX and DX desktops now feature Intel's fourth-generation Core, or "Haswell" processors, or AMD's A Series of APUs. Furthermore the company released a new version of its all-in-one One ZX desktop that features a 3GHz Pentium processor and a 21.5-inch LCD.

The new 15.6-inch NE will be sold at a pricing point of $380 while the 17.3-inch model will retail for $450. The entry-level DX desktop will run $289 while the smaller SX starts at $398, and the all-in-one will lighten your wallet by $530. The company also introduced a new KX Series of desktop displays that start at $99 for a 19.5-inch screen.

After speaking with a source that is said to be close to Apple, KitGuru said that they have learned that Apple's new Mac Pro would most likely ship to consumers and arrive for retail sales sometime during the month of October. They also stated that the Mac Pro would return to the UK around the same time after the line was removed from sale in 27 countries back in March of this year.

The delay in release is said to be due to a shortage on E5 processors as well as their mating motherboards. Additionally, analysts are speculating that Apple is waiting on its new operating system Mavericks to be released as it currently is limited to 96 GB of memory. With the new Mac Pro offering up to 128GB of RAM, this makes perfect sense. Apple could also be holding off on releasing the new Mac Pro due to ongoing Thunderbolt 2 development which is said to wrap up sometime during Q3 of 2013.

To further bait the rumor mill, Apple is said to be working on a 4K HDTV screen that will be geared specifically for professionals in the video editing field who would most likely also be purchasing the new Mac Pro's. Whether all of this is true or not is still a bit of a mystery and the only way to truly answer all of the questions is to wait around until October and see what Apple launches.

This morning, ORIGIN PC announced that they have updated their award-winning GENESIS line of desktops to feature AMD's latest FX-9000 series CPUs. The GENESIS will now be available with either AMD's FX-9590 or FX-9370 CPUs. ORIGIN says that with the new FX-9000 series processors, their customers will be able to immerse themselves in the most advanced games like never before.

Starting at just $1551, users would available to purchase an eight-core game-smashing monster that is clocked from the factory at up to 5 GHz. The GENESIS series includes a custom liquid cooled design and ships Windows 8 ready. ORIGIN says that users can customize their model with over 10,000 different building options. Additionally, ORIGIN offers lifetime 24/7 support for the best PC gaming experience.

This morning, MAINGEAR announced the launch of an entirely new series of custom liquid cooled PCs. Knowing that hard-core enthusiast preferred custom liquid cooling over all-in-one solutions, MAINGEAR teamed up with EKWB to create the new EPIC series of custom liquid cooled desktop PCs.

The EPIC series is comprised of the full-tower Force and mid-sized Rush models that both feature a "BiTurbo" pump design that ensures your system stays cool in the event one pump should fail. Also present are Intel's fourth-generation Core i7 or AMD's FX processors. On the graphics side, the force model can be packed with up to four NVIDIA GTX Titans or four Radeon HD 7970, with the Rush model only featuring a maximum of two GPUs.

As with all other MAINGEAR offerings, a plethora of memory, storage, fans, lighting, and paint combinations are available. At the moment, no information has been released on pricing or availability, but you can expect the prices to be fairly stout based on the hardware specifications listed above as well as the attention to detail MAINGEAR puts into every PC it builds. On a side note, how sexy is that Corsair 900D in lime green?

Digital Storm are back once again with a new gaming PC that will send your credit card bill through the roof, introducing the Aventum II. The Aventum II steps it up considerably, as it was built by Digital Storm's in-house team of engineers, taking ten years worth of customer requests to build the dream machine.

No off-the-shelf components chassis or cooling was used, it all had to be custom built from the ground up. Rajeev Kuruppu, Digital Storm's Director of Product Development says: "We (Digital Storm) unveiled an Aventum II prototype at CES 2013 and have been working to prefect the design since. The final product is a unique system, completely designed from the ground up featuring a bold look and packing enough power to go toe to toe with any PC on the planet."

Today, Logic Supply announced the release of their LGX ML250 Intel Core i3 / i5 fanless industrial PC systems. The system is built around ASRocks's IMB-170 industrial motherboard and features Intel's Core i3, i7, and Celeron processors. The systems are being touted as "an economical alternative to wide-temperature fanless systems. The LGX ML250 combines commercial-off-the-shelf, high-performance, mobile computing with a silent, compact, fanless chassis that's designed to be redesigned."

The systems feature a wide range of customizing options including three different processors, several memory choices, and SSD and HDD storage options. The devices can be accessorized with two different Wi-Fi setups and features several different mounting options.

Operating system options run the full gamut of Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Embedded, and even Linux distribution choices. The LGX ML250 was "designed to be redesigned" which makes it easily rebranded or customized to fit your application. Options range from additional front panel I/O designs to screen printing.

Intel seems to be quite proud of the fact they now power the top supercomputer in the world. Today, the Top500 list of supercomputers was updated and a new first-place system was crowned. The Milky Way 2 is a supercomputer located in China and powered by Intel. It booted out a former US-based system powered by AMD.

Milky Way 2 is capable of 54.9 PFlops, or 54.9 quadrillion floating point operations per second. This is more than twice the performance that the former leader was capable of. Even more interesting, this is the first Intel-powered system to take the crown since 1997, or a span of more than 15 years.

Milky Way 2 is powered by 32,000 Intel Xeon processors and 48,000 Intel Xeon Phi processors. It has over 3 million processing cores across its nodes. You can read more about the system at Intel's blog post, linked at Source #1 below.

Computex Taipei 2013 - Walking around for a solid third day we continue to find ourselves bumping into cool things we missed in the past few days. Hanging around the ASRock stand for a while this afternoon and being a general nuisance to the overclockers Chris decided to make sure we did something a little more useful with our time.

He took me over to the new ASRock M8 Series barebone system which looks fantastic. Designed by the BMW Designworks USA team they've put together a great looking chassis that comes in red and black. The sides of the case are magnetic and come out very easily making access to the main area good.

Inside you'll find the new Haswell based Z87-ITX motherboard from ASRock along with a SFX 450W PSU. Being a barebone means that the rest of the system will have to be filled out with CPU, RAM, Video Card, Storage and the other normal bits and pieces. Video Card support is also very strong thanks to a riser card included making cards as large as the GTX 780 an option.

Computex Taipei 2013 - TweakTown worked with various companies to break the PCMark storage world record, but one of them was the awesome BitFenix and their Prodigy case which we've called the TweakTown Blue Prodigy PC, you can read more on that here.

We thought we'd capture it on video, as sometimes pictures just aren't good enough. The machine looks beautiful in person, and inside the machine we have a world record setting 16 SSD's that give some truly, truly insane performance. Of course, BitFenix's Prodigy is a beautiful case to begin with, and with the magic of our own Chris Ramseyer, TweakTown were etched into the record books.